Once again, my state’s elected leadership has let its people down:
The MTA is pushing “pause” on New York City’s first-in-the-nation congestion pricing plan indefinitely, according to an official briefed on the plans. The toll program, years in the making, had been set to roll out later this month.
No new start date has been set.
After years of fighting, New York City was finally about to implement congestion pricing. The plan was to charge a $15 toll to drive into Manhattan below 60th Street during the daytime. All the agreements had been struck, all the technology had been put in place. There were roadside billboards advertising that it was set to begin on June 30.
Then, at the last possible minute, Gov. Kathy Hochul – who’d previously been a supporter of congestion pricing – flip-flopped and pulled the plug on it. She gave no explanation for her sudden change of heart, other than mealy-mouthed excuses about how more studies were needed.
The revenue from congestion pricing had been earmarked for the MTA, New York’s transit agency. The cancellation blows a $15 billion hole in their budget, which Hochul’s plan to fix was… nothing. The legislature convened to debate the problem, but they too threw up their hands and went home without doing anything.
I can’t be the only one who finds driving unpleasant. It’s expensive, tedious, stressful and dangerous. We lose countless hours of our lives to sitting in traffic or circling to look for parking. We spend huge sums of money on car payments, insurance, registration, gas and tolls. Most of us put up with this because we’ve grown up with it and we think of it as normal – but, like many popular assumptions, it pays to question it. There’s a better way to live.
In an ideal world, walking, biking, and mass transit would be the default ways of getting around. We’d live in pleasant, human-scale neighborhoods with dense housing, amenities like shops, restaurants and libraries within easy strolling distance, and public parks and green space for recreation. When we had to travel longer distances, there would be a wealth of clean, quiet, efficient options: electric buses, streetcars, subways and trains on convenient schedules.
Instead, we’ve designed a society where cars are the only feasible way for most people to get around. This causes all the evils of car culture: perpetual traffic jams, impassable highways bisecting neighborhoods, huge swaths of valuable space devoted to parking, huge amounts of precious time lost to commuting, and a steady toll of deaths and injuries in crashes.
And the costs aren’t only borne by drivers. People who live along those gridlocked roads have to breathe the air pollution that’s belched out by cars and trucks idling under their windows. Some neighborhoods in the Bronx are called “Asthma Alley” for their high rates of respiratory disease. And of course, the more cars are on the road, the more damage is done to the climate by burning fossil fuels.
The only way to fix this is to make driving a less attractive option, by raising tolls and parking fees, and make the alternatives more attractive, by investing in mass transit. If the costs of driving are high enough, people will switch to something else. It’s a win-win: less traffic for the people who truly have to drive, less pollution for all of us. This is the reasoning behind congestion pricing.
The problem is the psychological tendency of loss aversion. People get angry when they have to pay for something that used to be “free” – even though driving isn’t free and never was. Arguably, it’s the most expensive means of traveling. But because many of the costs are externalized onto society, individual commuters perceive it as better than mass transit. Naturally, they’ll protest if they perceive the cost of driving as going up (even though it’s not a new cost, it’s the true cost, which congestion pricing would have put on the responsible parties for the first time).
Politicians like Hochul are terrified of that anger, especially from white surburbanites who are shaping up to be a critical swing vote. But if they let fear of backlash drive every decision, nothing will ever change. For the world to improve, someone has to have the imagination to envision how the world could be better, and the courage to fight for that vision and turn it into reality. This debacle shows that even many allegedly liberal politicians lack that imagination and that courage.